 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0627-2117-01 | Advanced Syntax | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 6.0
Course description
Advanced Syntax: Syntactic Processing
The course adopts the assumption that production and processing of linguistic utterances employ the same computational tools. If so, then instances of processing breakdown can shed light on the design of the Computational System. In the first part of the course, we will concentrate on the so-called Garden Path phenomenon (e.g., After Sara drank the water evaporated). We will define the difficulty and the principles guiding processing, using syntactic devices, and explain why the human processor cannot overcome the difficulty automatically (as is clear from the fact that it is conscious). The second part of the course will explore syntactic movement and the constraints it obeys. For instance, why is it that movement of who is possible in "Who do you think that Dan loves?" but not in "*Who did you meet that woman who loves?"? We will define the constraints imposed on movement, and use them to diagnose movement in structures where it is not obvious whether or not movement has applied. In sum, we will define the workings of the computational system with regard to the processing and production phenomena discussed in the course.
The course adopts the assumption that production and processing of linguistic utterances employ the same computational tools. If so, then instances of processing breakdown can shed light on the design of the Computational System. In the first part of the course, we will concentrate on the so-called Garden Path phenomenon (e.g., After Sara drank the water evaporated). We will define the difficulty and the principles guiding processing, using syntactic devices, and explain why the human processor cannot overcome the difficulty automatically (as is clear from the fact that it is conscious). The second part of the course will explore syntactic movement and the constraints it obeys. For instance, why is it that movement of who is possible in "Who do you think that Dan loves?" but not in "*Who did you meet that woman who loves?"? We will define the constraints imposed on movement, and use them to diagnose movement in structures where it is not obvious whether or not movement has applied. In sum, we will define the workings of the computational system with regard to the processing and production phenomena discussed in the course.